#81: Compare and Contrast -- US vs. EU AI standardisation
The EuropeanAI Newsletter
Covering Artificial Intelligence in Europe
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The German AI Association published the results of their feasibility study on Large European AI Models (LEAM, English version forthcoming). It also published the results of an EU-wide AI impact survey, consulting AI start-ups, VCs and AI organisation across Europe.
The German Council on Foreign Relations published a report examining how the EU can achieve strategic technology autonomy from China. In doing so, it operationalizes Open Strategic Autonomy via four dimension: resilience of supply chains; national security; defence of value and sustainability; and, technological competitiveness.
Following critiques by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties on the lack of GDPR enforcement against Big Tech, the European Commission committed to examine the progress of every large scale GDPR case, six times a year.
In an assumed leak of the "fair share" consultation, it appears that the European Commission is considering charging large companies that use significant amounts of bandwidth, in order to support the EU's next generation internet infrastructure.
The Swedish Presidency of the Council appears to have circulated a compromise text on the Cyber Resilience Act. This includes a purported move from reporting of product vulnerabilities to ENISA (EU's cybersecurity agency) to national Computer Security Incident Response Teams.
Policy, Strategy and Regulation
State of play: European AI Standardisation
Last week, the European Parliament' IMCO committee held a public hearing on standardization in the EU's single market. Mrs. Maive Rute, the Chief Standardization Officer of the European Commission, Mrs. Elena Santiago Cid, the Director General of European Committee for Standardization (CEN) and European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC), as well as other representatives of pan-European standardization organizations, trade and consumer associations took part in the hearing. Mrs. Santiago Cid confirmed that standardization in the field of AI was among the priorities of CEN and CENELEC. Morevover, the significance of international strategic partnerships with “like minded partners” on standardization was stressed.
Notes in the margins: In response to an MEP’s question regarding swifter adoption of standards in order to implement the EU’s AI policy, it was noted that the European Commission would prefer to go through the established process of standardization, if consensus among stakeholder existed. If, however, the European Commission needed to “move fast” and the regular standardization process did not deliver, the European Commission could then consider the possibility for adopting common specifications.
Deep Dive: Provisional agreement on the Machinery Regulation
The Council of the European Union and the European Parliament reached a provisional political agreement on the Regulation on Machinery (the “Machinery Regulation”). This essentially completes the substantive legislative debates on this file. As we have previously reported, the Machinery Regulation 2021 introduces uniform EU-wide essential health and safety requirements for the design and construction of machinery and related products. It applies to a wide range of machinery and related products, including such that incorporate AI systems (e.g. as safety component). The health and safety requirements will apply to machinery products embedding AI or having AI systems as a safety component alongside to the substantive requirements concerning AI systems (e.g. risk assessment, data governance, cyber security) under the AI Act.
The Council and the European Parliament agreed on a number of amendments of relevance to AI, according to the rapporteur for the European Parliament on the file and the inter-institutional amendments discussed. In order to enable the implementation of the Machinery Regulation prior to the adoption of a formal definition of AI under the AI Act, the compromise text of the Machinery Regulation drops its own definition of and any references to AI. Instead, the compromise text specifies in Annex I, part A, the types of AI systems that fall essentially within scope of the Machinery Regulation. Those are AI systems that are embedded in machinery or serve as safety components and have “fully or partially self-evolving behavior using machine learning”. These systems are considered as high-risk components. The European Commission will be able to update the list of such high-risk components and include new categories when the technological progress prompts so.
Another major amendment under the compromise texts of the Machinery Regulation is the fine-tuning of the conformity assessment regimes that the various types of machinery and related products must undergo. The AI systems in scope remain subject to mandatory conformity assessment by third-party conformity assessment bodies. Compliance with the essential health and safety requirements under the Machinery Regulation will be assessed by reference to harmonized EU-wide voluntary standards. They are to be crafted by the European Union standardization organizations CEN, CENELEC and ETSI. The compromise text empowers the European Commission to adopt common specifications for the purposes of conformity assessments. As the Council points out in a recent statement, however, the Commission should proceed to adopting such specifications only as “a last resort”, if the established consultation process could not yield harmonized standards.
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Dessislava Fessenko provided research and editorial support.
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